How can I add the "--watch" flag to this TextMate snippet? - css

Question

I love TextMate as my editor for all things web, and so I'd like to use a snippet to use it with style.less files to automatically take advantage of the .less way of compiling .css files on the fly using the native
$ lessc {filepath} --watch
as suggested in the less documentation (link)
My (thanks to someone who wrote the LESS TM Bundle!) current TextMate snippet works well for writing the currently opened .less file to the .css file but I'd like to take advantage of the --watch parameter so that every change to the .less file gets automatically compiled into the .css file.
This works well when using the Terminal command line for it, so I am sure it must be possible to use it in an adapted version of the current LESS Command for TextMate since that only invokes the command to compile the file.
So how do I add the --watch flag to this command:?
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
file = STDIN.read[/lessc: ([^*]+\.less)/, 1] || ENV["TM_FILEPATH"]
system("lessc \"#{file}\"")
I assume it should be something like:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
file = STDIN.read[/lessc: ([^*]+\.less)/, 1] || ENV["TM_FILEPATH"]
system("lessc \"#{file}\" --watch")
But doing so only crashes the TextMate.app.

Answer 1

Did you try running it as a background task?
system("lessc \"#{file}\" --watch &")

Answer 2

I'm guessing you have to put the --watch parameter before the file parameter to lessc, like so:
system("lessc --watch \"#{file}\"")

Answer 3

Take a look at this snippet. It doesn't use the --watch flag, but if you link it to the cmd+s key combination it works perfectly. The snippet will also compile any less files that reference (i.e. #import) the file that was changed. This is great if you have a until.less or something that you include in many different less files, if you change the util.less all the LESS files that depend on it will auto-compile.
Combine that script with the browser refresh script and you have a fairly decent web dev testing routine.